I continue to mull over Jim Ryan's naturalization project with respect to salvation. It seems to me that salvation is but one of several religious 'objects' that resist naturalist reduction. God and sin are two others. But if God, sin, and salvation cannot be reduced to anything natural, they can be eliminated. Thus I recommend to Ryan that he take an eliminativist line. Actually, I would like to see him abandon his naturalism. That is not likely to happen. But I do hope to be able to convince him that it is folly to try to capture the content of religious notions in naturalist terms. The better approach, and more honest to boot, is for the naturalist to deny that these notions correspond to anything real.
1. Xs exist, but Xs are reductively identifiable with Ys
and saying
2. Xs do not exist.
For example, there is a prima facie difference between saying that there are mental states, but mental states are identical to brain states, and saying that there are no mental states. This is the difference between identitarian and eliminativist approaches. Of course, one might wonder how a mental state such as a sensory quale could survive indentification with a physical state, given the incomprehensibility of physical states having the phenomenological features that we have come to know, love, and sometimes dread in (some) mental states, and thus how such an identification could fail to collapse into an elimination, but let's not worry about this problem. On the face of it, it seems that the identity/elimination distinction makes sense in some areas of inquiry.
But it makes no sense in the cases of salvation, sin, and God. As regards salvation, this is in effect what I argued earlier: to identify salvation with some such mental state as ataraxia is to eliminate it. Such a state may be enjoyed by one saved, but salvation cannot consist in being in this state.
But let's consider God and an attempt to reduce God to something naturalistically respectable. There is the Feuerbachian suggestion that God is an unconscious (i.e., unconsciously projected) anthropomorphic projection. It strikes me as evident, however that to identify God with an unconscious anthropomorphic projection is to eliminate God. For God, by definition, exists a se, from himself. A god that was ab alio, from another, would not be God. No projection, however, anthropomorphic or otherwise, conscious or unconscious, exists a se. Therefore, nothing that could count as God could be an anthropomorphic projection. It follows that to identify God with such a projection is precisely to eliminate, i.e., deny the existence of, God. Thus when one says that God is a projection, one is saying in effect that God does not exist, that God is merely an idea in the minds of human beings. Generalizing, to identify God with anything naturalistically respectable is to eliminate God. For nothing naturalistically respectable is going to have the properties characteristic of God, such properties as aseity, necessity, simplicity, and the omni-attributes.
The same goes for sin. Sin, if the term means anything, connotes an offense to God. If God does not exist, then sin, strictly speaking, cannot exist. There is no room for sin in the naturalists' world. So a clear thinking naturalist ought to be be an elimnativist about sin, God, salvation, and indeed every religious 'object.' Prayer is another example. A naturalist can meditate, but he cannot pray.